Mas parked her BMW in the Perdido Street parking lot and opened one of her saddlebags. She took out a manila expanding file and her bottled water, and walked briskly toward the side entrance of City Hall, the folder tucked under her arm and her free hand clutching the strap of her shoulder bag as she took a sip of water.
Her iPhone rang. She sighed, juggled all her stuff, plucked it off her hip, and answered it.
“Agent Mas.”
“Hi, it’s me. Those phone logs came in from CSI.”
“Good deal. Could you fax them over to Captain Thorrington’s office? I’m going up there now.”
“Will do.”
“Thanks, Charlene.”
Mas ended the call, holstered her phone, and trotted up the stairs. She put her badge, her gun, her phone, her bag, and the file through the scanner, but she kept her water, defiantly sipping it as she let the guard wand her before she stepped through the detector.
Her keys set off the beeper, and the guard grinned at her. She dug them out of her leather jacket and tossed them in a tray.
The guard let her through and she scooped up all her stuff, checking the wall clock. The Cap’n wanted to see her at eleven. She headed for the elevators, nodding hello to the occasional cop. NOPD headquarters was up on the third floor.
Mark Kaddouri would be at the meeting, too. Mas hadn’t seen him in almost a month, and wondered if he finally finished rebuilding his back deck. Katrina tore it right off his house and deposited it two blocks away. His car and his garage had both wound up across the street in his neighbor’s front yard. The car was still inside, and the garage door was down and padlocked. The garage was rebuilt by a shyster contractor from out of state and had to be completely redone. Mark got so angry that he went to Home Depot and loaded up on tools, how-to books, and a pile of lumber. Carpentry became his weekend hobby, whether he liked it or not. And he didn’t. The garage had taken three years to finish, and the back porch was taking more than two.
She stepped off the elevator and headed down the hall to Captain Thorrington’s suite. Most of the officers on the floor knew her, and swapped hellos or nods. She’d stirred a lot of parochial jealousy when she went off to Virginia to become a Fed, but when she returned and wound up doing largely what she was doing before she left, her former colleagues eventually gave her their seal of approval. Local law enforcement always had a natural distrust of the Feds, particularly in the South, where the Confederacy was alive and well in many a heart, but Mas knew enough about being a cop, particularly an NOPD cop, to avoid stepping on too many toes.
She smiled good morning at Thorrington’s secretary. “How’s the weather, Helen?” Mas asked her.
Helen grinned at their secret code, and toasted her with a cup of coffee, a Krispy Kreme donut hung on her pinkie.
“He’s fine,” she told Mas. “He just had his coffee. Want some?”
Mas wiggled her bottle of water – I’m good. Helen wiggled her donut at Mas, and nodded at the box of donuts on her desk.
“You can wash that down with some Krispy Kremes.”
“Don’t you tempt me, now!”
Helen took a yummy bite, and they exchanged grins. After a lifetime of dieting, Helen finally retired and she never looked back.
“Mark’s here,” she told Mas. She watched for a reaction, but Mas just nodded as she passed Helen’s desk, a lingering glance at the donuts. Helen grinned and licked a stray crumb from her lips.
“I’m expecting a fax,” Mas said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Helen said, watching her. Helen was a matchmaker from way back. She even introduced the Cap’n to his wife, a retired district attorney. Mas was her next project.
Mas enter the Cap’n’s office, quietly shutting the door. One of these days, Helen thought, that girl has got to settle down.
Mark Kaddouri stood up from the chair in front of Thorrington’s desk, and smiled a warm hello. A fifth-generation Lebanese-American, Kaddouri was a lean, muscular homicide detective with fifteen years on the force. Princeton offered him a full scholarship, but he went across town to Tulane University instead. He loved New Orleans, and never had any plans to leave, not even for college. He joined the force the day after he got his Master’s in Criminal Justice. Mas had been his rookie, spending three years under him before she became a Fed.
She nodded pleasantly at her old boss, and then she smiled at Torrington, who was kicked back in his desk chair.
“Morning, Cap’n.”
“Morning, Agent Mas.”
Thorrington just looked at the two of them standing before his desk, a ghost of a bemused grin on his lips. He knew what was up, but he didn’t know why. He knew Kaddouri was sweet on her, and for good reason, but for some reason she wasn’t opening herself up to him. Kaddouri was probably the best thing she’d ever find in her line of work.
The only thing Thorrington could figure was that Mas was so wrapped up in the Branding case that she couldn’t get her mind on anything else. And that troubled him. She was losing perspective and life was passing her by. Or eating her alive, he didn’t know which.
He waved to a side chair. She sat down, placed her file on his desk, and got right to the point. “Let’s have a look at those videos, shall we?”
He was right; she couldn’t get her mind on anything else. He glanced at Kaddouri. “Mark? You do the honors. I’m no good with that computer stuff.”
Kaddouri smiled and waved a hand at the worktable against the wall. A PC was already up and running, with a card reader cabled into it. “Have a seat,” he said.
Mas and Thorrington got up and the three of them sat at the table, Kaddouri in front of the computer. He pivoted the screen so they could all see, and slipped a memory card into the reader. He moused around as they watched the screen.
A grainy, stuttering camera clip taken from ground level showed Fareed Younis falling from his balcony. They could hear the crowd around the camera gasping on the tinny audio track, and they heard Fareed hit the sidewalk with a muffled thud.
Kaddouri popped out the memory card and slipped in another one. This shot was from a cell phone, another low-res clip, but with no audio track. Watching Fareed fall in silence was even more unsettling than the first shot.
He swapped the card for a third one and played another clip. It was substantially the same image as the first, but this one was shot with a halfway decent camera. Still, there was nothing new to see. Fareed’s body thumped onto the concrete sidewalk and bounced once, and the crowd gasped.
The fourth clip was from another digital camera, but it was from a different angle than the others. It started with a slow pan of the crowd gathered at the jump site. The cops at the roadblock could all be seen, as well as Thorrington standing by his squad car, his megaphone in hand and looking up at Fareed’s balcony. Dr. Osborn was standing with his assistant by the coroner’s van and the paramedics had their equipment out. They all had their heads tilted back, watching. Beyond them was Archbishop Nano’s black Maybach limousine. Fareed jumped, and the crowd watched him fall.
As Fareed lay dying on the sidewalk, Mas frowned at the screen, noticing something odd, and pointed to it. “What’s that?”
Kaddouri froze the clip and they all leaned forward for a better look. Whatever it was, it was just a soft red blur beside a grey translucent blob. Kaddouri fiddled with the software and cleaned up the image.
Mas reacted with a quick intake of breath, staring at the screen. Kaddouri instinctively leaned forward again and Thorrington squinted for a better look.
A glowing red cigarette cherry floated in midair in the midst of the crowd. Close behind it was what looked like an exhaled lungful of cigarette smoke. But there was no cigarette to be seen, and there was no smoker either.
Mas and Kaddouri swapped glances. “That’s weird,” she said.
“Very weird,” he replied.
Thorrington just nodded, silently agreeing with them.
“Can you roll it in slo-mo?” Mas asked Kaddouri.
He jumped to the beginning of the clip and they watched it again in slow motion. Fareed jumped, and the crowd stared at his shattered body. As the camera panned the frozen spectators, they saw a crystal-clear image of the cigarette cherry suspended in midair, close to the camera. Right behind it, a lungful of smoke was exhaled into existence. It billowed lazily around the cherry, and then without warning the image suddenly pixilated and froze. A moment later, the screen went black.
Kaddouri fiddled with the program and Thorrington sneered at him. “Great,” Thorrington said. “‘The computer that ate Exhibit A.’ Outstanding, Kaddouri...”
Kaddouri kept his cool, and fiddled with the PC until it was obvious that it wasn’t going to cooperate. He sighed and tapped the power button twice for a hard reboot.
They sat there waiting for it to walk through its paces. It took for-freaking-ever.
“You guys need to switch to a Mac,” Mas teased them.
Kaddouri nodded, taking it on the chin, and Thorrington just watched the screen. He hated computers. He didn’t even like email. “I have a phone number,” he would remind people. “Leave a goddamn message.”
The screen finally came to life, and Kaddouri jumped back to the start of the clip, rolling it again. They all leaned forward to watch.
The clip played exactly as before, without a flaw to be seen, except that the cigarette cherry and the cloud of smoke were no longer in the shot.
Mas and Kaddouri glanced at each other again. They had no idea what just happened, and Thorrington was as puzzled as they were.
“Ghost in the machine?” Thorrington asked. “Voodoo?”
Kaddouri shrugged. Thorrington glanced at Mas for her take on it, but she was as frustrated as they were. More than that, an edge of anger was rising inside of her, and Thorrington didn’t like what he saw. He caught Kaddouri’s eye.
“Could we have a moment, Mark?”
Kaddouri sensed that something was up, and nodded. He knew as well as the Captain did that Mas was on a short fuse, especially when it came to the Branding Killer. He didn’t like it any more than Thorrington did. They both worried about her, but neither of them knew exactly what to do about it. Kaddouri slid his chair back and got up, opening the door to the outer office as he did. He quietly stepped out and closed the door behind him, leaving them alone.